Current Goals

DSA Fund works to challenge dominant neoliberal ideas, namely that government should prioritize balancing the budget and that economic prosperity depends on low tax rates on high income households and corporations, further government cuts in social welfare programs, and the weakening of both government regulation and the power of unions. Yet the resistance to the attacks on public sector workers in Wisconsin and Ohio, along with campus mobilizations against crippling tuition increases and massive student debt, indicates that large numbers of people are willing to fight the policy outcomes of neoliberal ideas. The Occupy movement has successfully brought inequality, corporate greed and poverty back into mainstream discussion. DSA Fund seeks to strengthen progressive politics by building a bridge between the labor movement, youth mobilized by Occupy, and other youth- and community-based movements. We work to equip grassroots activists to organize effectively around an alternative, “social market” common sense and policies related to economic issues and job creation.

The components of this alternative viewpoint should include an understanding of (i) the importance of strong labor and social movements to counterbalance the power of capital in the labor market, (ii) the need to counter the inequality of market outcomes through universal social insurance and high-quality public goods financed by progressive taxation, and (iii) social market (or left Keynesian) alternatives to neoliberalism, including public investment in infrastructure, education (from pre-K through university) and full employment policies.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.